Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2009 winner

Hagan Bayley
University of Oxford

Awarded for his contribution to the commercialisation of nanopore research.

About the winner

Hagan Bayley is the Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. He enjoys working at the interface of chemistry and biology by, for example, developing techniques for protein modification that have applications in both basic science and biotechnology. 

He received his B.A. in chemistry from Oxford in 1974, while at Balliol College, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1979 in the laboratory of Jeremy Knowles. After postdoctoral work with Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was on the faculty at Columbia University and the University of Oxford.

From 1988 to 1996, he was at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and from 1997 to 2003 at Texas A&M University in College Station. Dr. Bayley has published about 200 papers in journals including Science and Nature. His laboratory's work on the engineering of membrane pores has received widespread attention and in 1997 it was described in an article in Scientific American. 

Recently, the development of engineered pores for stochastic sensing, the rapid screening of membrane proteins, the study of covalent chemistry at the single molecule level and ultrarapid DNA sequencing have become major interests of the laboratory. In 2005, Dr. Bayley founded Oxford Nanopore Technologies to exploit the potential of stochastic sensing technology.